Parkwood Springs – A fringe in time: Temporality and heritage in an urban fringe landscape

This is a repository copy of Parkwood Springs – A fringe in time: Temporality and heritage in an urban fringe landscape.

White Rose Research Online URL for this paper: http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/136048/

Version: Accepted Version

Article:

Jorgensen, A, Dobson, S and Heatherington, C (2017) Parkwood Springs – A fringe in time: Temporality and heritage in an urban fringe landscape. Environment and Planning A, 49 (8). pp. 1867-1886. ISSN 0308-518X

https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X17704202

(c) The Author(s) 2017. Jorgensen, A, Dobson, S and Heatherington, C (2017) Parkwood Springs – A fringe in time: Temporality and heritage in an urban fringe landscape.

Environment and Planning A, 49 (8). pp. 1867-1886. ISSN 0308-518X Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications.

eprints@whiterose.ac.uk https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ Reuse

Items deposited in White Rose Research Online are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved unless indicated otherwise. They may be downloaded and/or printed for private study, or other acts as permitted by national copyright laws. The publisher or other rights holders may allow further reproduction and re-use of the full text version. This is indicated by the licence information on the White Rose Research Online record for the item.

Takedown

If you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by

Parkwood Springs

–

A fringe in time: Temporality and heritage in an

urban fringe landscape

Anna Jorgensen, University of Sheffield Stephen Dobson, Coventry University,

Catherine Heatherington University of Sheffield, UK

Introduction

Whilst there has been much recent interest in urban and post-industrial ruins and urban derelict and waste landscapes (see e.g. Berger, 2007; DeSilvey and Edensor, 2013; Gandy, 2013; Jorgensen and Tylecote, 2007), this has rarely focused on their cultural significance as sites of urban landscape heritage, nor on an in-depth discussion of the implications for the future of these sites. This paper aims to advance the theory and practice of landscape heritage planning, design and management, focusing especially on the question: What is the relationship between landscape narrative – the ways in which we tell the story of a landscape – and landscape heritage outcomes? The paper examines this question in the context of one urban waste site, Parkwood Springs, in the city of Sheffield, UK.

‘Landscape heritage’ is commonly thought to refer to that which is considered to be of lasting value in landscape (Whitehand and Gu, 2010), encompassing individual landscape elements, for example woodlands or coastal defences, composite landscapes, for example historic parks and gardens, as well as large scale landscapes, for example the Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape, a UNESCO World Heritage cultural landscape in south west England. One of the 12 core principles of England’s National Planning Policy Framework (2012: 6) is that planning should ‘conserve heritage assets [including landscapes] in a manner appropriate to their significance, so that they can be enjoyed for their contribution to the quality of life of this and future generations’. The attribution of value typically leads to landscape heritage ‘outcomes’ aimed at the interpretation and conservation of these landscapes, ranging from a listing on registers such as Historic England’s Register of Parks and Gardens, or the World Heritage list of cultural landscapes, to smaller scale interventions of more local significance, for example the creation of heritage trails. These processes of valuation are underpinned by narratives that seek to justify the status, meaning and significance of the landscapes in question.

temporally demarcated: ‘Heritage has traditionally been conceived... as a discrete ‘‘site’’, ‘‘object’’, building or other structure with identifiable boundaries that can be mapped, surveyed, recorded, and placed on national or international site registers’ (Smith, 2006: 31). Further, it is a representation of an (often exclusive) social identity that is designed to be passively consumed by visitors.

Scholarly attention is therefore moving away from deterministic and definitive histories and the establishment heritage they support towards discursive, multiple and sometimes conflicting accounts reflecting different social and cultural perspectives and identities (Wu and Hou, 2015). The interdisciplinary academic field of Heritage Studies has seen a reframing of heritage ‘as discourse concerned with the negotiation and regulation of social meaning and practice associated with the creation and recreation of identity’ (Smith, 2006: 5). This increasingly democratized understanding of heritage has also permeated landscape policy and practice. The role of landscape heritage in the formation of identity, and its importance for communities, is recognized both by the European Landscape Convention (ELC) (2000),1 _{to, which the UK is a signatory, and by heritage}

initiatives such as the Landscape Partnerships funding programme of the Heritage Lottery Fund, which promotes a more inclusive approach to heritage practice, and emphasizes the multiple benefits to people and communities.

In this paper, we adopt DeSilvey’s (2012: 33) definition of narrative as ‘the ordering of events, actions and elements of experience in a communicative structure’. According to Potteiger and Purinton (1998: 3) narrative is therefore both a story, and the way in which it is told. Drawing on Ricoeur, they (1998:7) also claim that narratives have both a temporal and a spatial component.

The paper begins with a short introduction to Parkwood Springs. This is followed by Part 1, an outline of the main theoretical strands running through the paper, showing how different conceptualizations of time are mobilized in narrative, and how this affects interpretations of the past. Part 2 consists of three different forms of narrative about Parkwood Springs: a conventional history, a personal experiential account and an analysis based on the Sheffield Historic Landscape Characterisation (HLC) (South Yorkshire Archaeology Service (SYAS), undated), each preceded by a brief introduction. We consider that it is appropriate to examine the HLC as a narrative resource in this paper given the importance of landscape characterisation in both the ELC, and in heritage initiatives such as the landscape partnerships funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund.2 Part 3 is a critical comparative review of the narratives and their implications for the planning, design and management of Parkwood Springs as landscape heritage, and is followed by some final concluding remarks.

Parkwood Springs, Sheffield, UK

On a foray into Parkwood Springs in October 2010 a walking companion declared: ‘But this is an urban fringe landscape- surrounded by the city!’

Though no longer located at the edge of the city, its complex hotchpotch of land-uses does closely resemble the land-use combinations typically found in an urban fringe landscape, combining landfill, green space and derelict sites and structures, alongside a host of miscellaneous other official and unofficial uses. It is a considerable area, around 80 hectares in size, sprawling for nearly two kilometres along the eastern slope of the River Don valley, which runs due north from Sheffield’s urban core (Figure 1). This vast open landscape is itself only two kilometres from the city centre, and is completely surrounded by built development. Parkwood Springs is also imposing topographically: its steep slopes rise to a height of 174 metres, approximately 100 metres above the valley floor.

Figure 1. Location map of Parkwood Springs

Mill. (c) Gravestone in Wardsend Cemetery, amidst regenerated Silver Birch. (d) Allotment site on Parkwood Springs. (All photographs taken by Anna Jorgensen).

The Sheffield Local Plan (Sheffield City Council, 2009) designates Parkwood Springs as Open Space and a Site of Importance for Nature Conservation, with a Waste Management Area. The City Sites – Preferred Options document (Sheffield City Council, undated a) specifies that: ‘This site is proposed as major Open Space Improvement...This open space can be created and laid out on [sic] a phased approach as the tipping phases cease’. Tipping has now ceased. Sheffield City Council manages the site together with the Friends of Parkwood Springs, formed in 2010, whose aim is to ‘work towards improving the green space as a resource for local residents and the City’, envisioning Parkwood Springs as ‘our country park in the city’ (Friends of Parkwood Springs). Pursuant to that aim an area of green space to the south of the site has undergone a number of recent changes, including the creation of a forest garden and a mountain biking trail.

Part 1 – Time and narrative

Part 1 lays the foundation for our three narratives in Part 2 by exploring how diverse narrative forms have been used to know the past, focusing especially on the role of different conceptualisations of temporality in narrative. It goes on to demonstrate the relevance of these forms to a landscape context, and particularly waste sites such as Parkwood Springs. A central argument of this paper is that whilst such narratives seem to be retellings of the past, they are in fact projective and constitutive of the future: they are part of a process of becoming, shaping personal identities, environments and landscapes (Ingold, 2012). Thus, landscape histories and their forms determine what is significant and valued in a landscape, and how that significance and value is projected into the future as landscape heritage.

based on the Sheffield Historic Landscape Characterisation – combined with the landscape implications we draw from them in Part 3.

The ways in which time is conceptualized and represented in a narrative are fundamental to its intended meaning and purpose. There is perhaps still a general perception in western thought that all human beings have the same conception of time as a way of measuring duration, and ordering the sequence in which things happen. However, Farago (2005: 426) writes of ‘the culturally and historically specific nature of chronology as a western, European construct’. It follows that ‘the past’ and ‘the present’, inherent in the writing of history, are also culturally and historically specific:

history is not a fact of the world that is more or less accurately represented...it is only one way for a society to constitute the past and establish a relation with it. To live in history and to wish to write it, is not a universal anthropological postulate, but it is a certain way to conceive of and be in the world, and it is a certain practice of subjectivity. (Farago, 2005: 426)

We might add that history is ‘a practice of subjectivity’ even within and between cultures that subscribe to the idea of chronology (Crouch and Parker, 2003): there is no such thing as a definitive historical account.

The chronological view of time underpins the ‘grand narratives’ associated with modernity (Lyotard, 1984), which assume that progress takes a linear course, each step being an extropic movement on the path towards an ever more evolved and rationalised future. This notion of progression, as associated with ‘progress’, sets historic events as the inevitable increments toward our current state, thus attributing a false agency of time in the chronological narrative. As Farago (2005: 427) puts it: ‘Chronology is a powerful and seductive rhetorical apparatus, a fictive construct that masks ideology under the guise of ‘‘natural time’’‘. The chronological idea of time, and the heroic narratives and explanatory accounts of the world it supports, have been challenged across numerous disciplines in the late 20th century.

The canonical challenge must come from Walter Benjamin’s dialectical image, the vehicle he used to critique modernity in The Arcades Project. Set in the Paris Arcades, an ideal locale from which to critique the superfluity of capitalism, Benjamin used a montage of quotation and allusion to bring about revelatory insights into the relationships between things and their meanings. Benjamin’s sources are the ‘fragments of modernity’ (Frisby, 1986), not its grandiose expositions, but ‘the rags, the refuse’ (Benjamin, 1999: 460), cited in Friedlander (2008), the inconsequential statements, the asides. The dialectical image has its own temporality outside of chronological time:

experience of time. Any meaningful phenomenon has an inner life whose realization is brought about by a work of expression in that present which recognizes it. (Friedlander, 2008: 21)

Within the field of art history chronological time is contrasted with anachronism. Here, the discussion focuses, inter alia, on the question of whether it is possible for a later audience to understand the effect that works of art had on their viewers at the time they were produced. Didi-Huberman (2005: 38) is contemptuous of the idea that we can decipher the meaning of past objects:

Everything past is definitively anachronistic:...it exists only in the operations of a ‘reminiscing present,’ a present endowed with the admirable or dangerous power, precisely, of presenting it, and in the wake of this presentation, of elaborating it and representing it.

Yet despite this definitive statement, Didi-Huberman (2005: 17) acknowledges that the sheer materiality of objects does have an inherent power to move us profoundly. Whilst he claims that we have lost the ability to understand Christian art, the force and passion with which he writes about the visceral impact of Fra Angelico’s Annunciation contradicts this. He implies that some objects have a timeless capacity to affect us in the same way, confirmed by his assertion that the experience of archaic places...is nothing other than ‘the physical sensation of time’ (Didi-Huberman, 1996: 58).

Time, narrative and history are also the main preoccupations of Marc Singer’s (2003) exegesis of Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, a novel about African-American history. In the novel, the protagonist wrestles with the deterministic narrative chronologies of his oppressors: chronologies of progress, capitalism and Marxism. These narratives are deterministic, because if we subscribe to them, they define us, there is no place in them for alternative modes of thought and action. The Invisible Man must learn how ‘different concepts of time can inhibit or empower human agency and how the past exerts a continuing influence on the present’ (Singer, 2003: 392–393).

Ellison (1952 quoted in Singer, 2003: 389–390) puts forward an alternative idea of time: ‘the palimpsest: a synchronous conflation or superimposition of multiple historical periods upon the present’. The Invisible Man also learns how his outsider status enables him to step outside the flow of time: how to ‘slip into the breaks and look around’ (Ellison, 1952 quoted in Singer, 2003: 391) From this new perspective, he learns to critique the narratives of modernity, find his own sense of time, and recover his identity.

to configure (and reconfigure) our human experience of time and life into narrative identities’. In exploring the narrative strategies used by different entrepreneurs to describe the development of their businesses she uses three time frames, derived from Czarniawska (2004): chronological, cyclical and kairotic. Kairotic time is said to be ‘a narrative time punctuated by important events, which might even run chronologically backwards’. The Kairotic time frame was most frequently adopted by the entrepreneurs in telling their stories, often using physical metaphors such as jumping, skipping or leaping about in time (Hamilton, 2013: 70). Hamilton’s work chimes with Singer in the sense that they are both concerned with the power of unconventional narratives that provide ‘emancipatory possibilities from the compulsory nature of social and cultural norms’ (Hamilton, 2013: 76).

If using different time frames in narrative can be used to define personal identities that support or subvert social norms, they can also be used to suggest diverse landscape ‘becomings’ (Ingold, 2012). DeSilvey (2012: 34) challenges the conventional historical chronological narrative as a particular spatial and temporal framing that justifies the preservation of a landscape as it appears at a particular time. She asks the question of whether it is possible to ‘experiment with other ways of storying landscape, framing histories around movement rather than stasis, and drawing comparisons between past dynamism and future process?’ DeSilvey adopts what she calls an ‘anticipatory history’ (anticipatory of an uncertain future), arranging a selection of present-tense narrative excerpts from the past together with ‘auto-ethnographic anecdotes’ (2012: 36) in reverse chronological order to retell the story of Mullion Cove in Cornwall. Her aim is to disrupt the false agency of the chronological narrative and its deterministic implications for the future. Instead we see an assemblage of ‘past presents which remain open to addition and subtraction, the process of making sense and assembling story exposed’ (2012: 48).

(Woodward, 2002), with recent ruins especially confounding the grand narratives of development, progress and civilization, thereby legitimizing alternative readings of human endeavour and meaning (DeSilvey and Edensor, 2013). Derelict sites are frequently layered ‘pluritemporal’ landscapes, containing evidence of many previous pasts (DeSilvey and Edensor, 2013: 7). This temporal fluidity, combined with the mix of nature and culture, decay and disorder often found in derelict sites, makes their meanings ambivalent and difficult to distill (Jorgensen and Tylecote, 2007). Hill (2013: 381) writes of the spectral or uncanny quality of post-industrial landscapes, such as the sensation of smelling coal dust in a valley where mining has ceased, claiming that the idea has value ‘because it suggests that our experience of the world is haunted by a spacetime in which past and future co-exist, and interact, in uncertain and unpredictable ways’. All of these characteristics make ruins and derelict sites ‘exemplary alternative sites of memory’, in contrast to contemporary practices involving the commodification of memory, both in and out of place (Edensor, 2005: 830). Edensor (2005) also uses ghostly metaphors to characterize processes of remembering in these sites, including sudden manifestations of involuntary memories evoked by their sensory richness; embodied haunting in which the body is compelled by its surroundings to respond to and even re-enact the habitual movements of former inhabitants of the spaces; poltergeistic confrontations with the kinetic power of the forces of disintegration within the ruin; together with close encounters with evidence of the daily lives of the myriads of people who formerly used these sites and meetings with ‘unidentifiable ghosts’ representing uncanny ‘happenstance montages’ (2005: 844) of objects and matter.

Following this line of argument Parkwood Springs is therefore an ideal setting for an examination of landscape heritage theory and practice, focusing on these themes of time and narrative. Here, we find the palimpsestic superimposition of different historical periods and Benjamin’s (1999: 460) ‘rags’ and ‘refuse’, the source material for the dialectical images from which more profound insights may be gained. Parkwood Springs represents one of Ralph Ellison’s ‘breaks’, spatial as well as temporal. Parts of the landscape (especially the landfill) are currently represented as blank space on maps, and parts of the site are in a sense suspended between their previous uses and their future repurposing as an urban park. Parkwood Springs therefore allows us to ‘slip into the breaks and look around’ (Ellison, 1952 cited in Singer, 2003: 391). From this vantage point we can question the chronological narratives of authorized heritage discourse and examine the alternatives.

differences, and to determine how the narratives inform, complement, duplicate, subvert or detract from one other.

Part 2 – The narratives Narrative 1 – Tracing the documentary history of Parkwood Springs

One of the intriguing questions about Parkwood Springs is how it evolved into this sprawling and disorderly enclosed ‘urban fringe’ landscape so close to Sheffield city centre. Why are the landfill site and its associated land uses located here? This narrative is a conventional chronological historical account describing how Parkwood Springs was transformed from a feudal landscape to an enclosed post-industrial urban fringe site.

The settlement of Sheffield was founded in the 12th century by a Norman, William de Lovetot, whose retainer created a sub-manor at Shirecliffe, located to the south east of the current site (Walton, 1943a; Hey, 2010). By 1392 the manor had passed to Sir John Mounteney (Walton, 1943b), who obtained a royal charter to hunt throughout his lands, and to empark over 400 acres of land, including woodland and meadow, roughly contiguous with the current site. This became known as ‘The Old Park’ and remained in existence until at least 1795, when it, and Shirecliffe Hall (on the site of the original manor) are both shown in William Fairbank’s Map of the Parish of Sheffield. Whilst The Old Park and Hall remained seemingly unchanged, the industrialisation of Sheffield had begun, with several mills and forges having been constructed along the course of the Don bordering Parkwood Springs.

In the 1850s, Parkwood Springs saw its first radical modern transformation with the construction of the railway, which ran through the site, from north to south, parallel with the river. However, The Old Park woodland and Hall persisted right up to the early 1900s, but were then surrounded to the north by Wardsend Cemetery, and to the south and east by a fringe of housing and industry along the valley floor, with newly constructed terraced houses (known as Parkwood Springs) climbing up the southern slopes of the site (Jones and Jones, undated).

housing estates had been built to the north and east. Shirecliffe Hall was damaged by bombing during the 1939–1945 war and later demolished. The Parkwood Springs terraced houses were also eventually knocked down in the 1970s. Around this time, the southern part of the site was ‘landscaped’, and trees were planted. No longer used for passenger transport, the railway is still deployed infrequently for goods transportation.

From this brief historical overview it seems that what initially protected Parkwood Springs from wholesale development and exploitation in the 1800s was its post-deer park homogenous woodland character (at a time when timber was in demand, due to industrial expansion, and its importance as a source of fuel for steel-working and smelting). However, as timber declined in importance the extractive value of Parkwood Springs as a source of building materials and fireclay led to the felling of the woodland and its exploitation for the extraction of these natural resources, and as a site for gas and electricity power generation close to the sites of the old water powered mills. The Victorian bye-law terraced housing and industrial development filled the gap between Parkwood Springs and the city centre in circa 1900, turning Parkwood Springs into an urban fringe, but the steep terrain made housing unviable during the garden city housing boom of the early 1920s and 1930s, so that this development bypassed Parkwood Springs and continued Sheffield’s urban expansion to the north east, turning it into an enclosed urban fringe. In this respect Sheffield’s urban development, and the existence of Parkwood Springs, are explained by Whitehand’s (2010) ‘innovation/building cycle model’, according to which urban expansion occurs in waves in response to building cycles, fluctuating land values and transport innovations. With each cycle the expanding urban development leapfrogs the existing fringe, leading to concentric rings of urban fringe inside the city.

Narrative 2 – A personal account

I find Parkwood Springs both appalling and fascinating, as well as being deeply evocative. In February 2012, I approach it via my usual route from the south, passing the euphemistically named sauna, the demolition waste reprocessing yard with its noise and dust, the vast heaps of reprocessed rubble, earth slopes and unbelievable quantities of rubbish discarded by fly-tippers and passers-by. I feel as though I am leaving the regulated and ordered part of Sheffield behind and entering a kind of Wild West where anything goes. Along Club Mill Lane the ruins of the Old Park Silver Mill are intriguing, evoking curiosity about their past, and inviting exploration (Figure 2(b)). Catherine Heatherington and I stood beside this ruin a couple of years ago, by the confluence of the rivers Don and Loxley, and watched a flock of long-tailed tits flitting through the tree tops on the far side of the river. I notice that the caravan installed beside the ruin has gone, though the neat fence that was put up to demarcate the territory associated with this temporary home remains. Just beyond the Old Park Silver Mill, further along Club Mill Lane, and surrounded by dereliction, is a small industrial estate, packed with small and seemingly prosperous factories and industrial units. At its far end it is possible to see right into a metal working factory and catch glimpses of the incandescent interiors of furnaces, and men wearing protective clothing and visors. Somehow this sight is evocative of a pre ‘Full Monty’3 _{Sheffield, when the steel industry was}

still in its heyday, and for a moment it feels as though time has somehow left this place untouched. At the core of the site the waste is modelled into enormous terraces and embankments, and capped with more rubble, and on the older slopes pioneer tree species have already aggressively taken hold, forming dense impenetrable thickets. Along the top of a whale-backed mound close to the river someone has made an orderly row of gigantic tree stumps. I start to feel as though I have entered a primeval territory, where the raw materials of the earth are being crudely re-assembled into new landscapes. Just beyond the edge of the tip is Wardsend Cemetery (Figure 2(c)). It has the poignancy of all disused and overgrown cemeteries, but here that is re-enforced by its location beside the tip, which seems to be encroaching onto the graves and memorials and obliterating them. Perched above the cemetery at the northern end of the escarpment is a small, embattled allotment site, each garden defensively re-enforced with stout but ramshackle barriers against thieves and intruders. Through these fences, and surrounded by the sporadic barking from the dogs protecting their owner’s small territories, I glimpse winter vegetables growing in dark earth, and pigeon lofts (Figure 2(d)).

of its name) was a river of refuse and discarded car tyres. During our tour we saw only two people, a young couple in waterproofs taking a swift short cut across the site. I tried to be enthusiastic, but thought I sensed a credibility gap opening up between us. Although they had both lived and worked in Sheffield for many years, neither of my colleagues had ever been to Parkwood Springs, or given it much thought. Ed said that it was like Sheffield’s collective unconscious, necessary, but not somewhere you wanted to go.

On a later visit with Stephen Dobson in May 2013 the sun was shining, and there were signs of change. Club Mill Lane had been closed beyond the industrial estate, and shiny new barriers erected to prevent vehicular access along the future recreational route running north beside the river. Significant tree planting had taken place on the older slopes of the landfill site and bluebells were flowering in the ancient woodland next to the allotments.

Narrative 3 – Historic landscape character analysis

Historic Landscape Characterisation (HLC) has its origins in the ‘post-modern revision’ of archaeology theory in the 1980s (Turner, 2006), which replaced traditional approaches focusing primarily on the site as an evidential repository that could be used to provide authoritative explanations concerning processes of human adaption, subsistence and settlement at particular locations and times in the past (Fairclough, 2012; Turner, 2006). This shift was characterised by the acceptance of a plurality of interpretations concerning the social and cultural dimensions of a reciprocal and dynamic relationship between people and place, and a greater emphasis on landscape perception (Bender, 1993; Fairclough, 2012; Tilley, 1994; Turner, 2006).

HLC offers a ‘retrogressive narrative’ (Rippon, 2004) in that the starting point for analysis are the morphological units in the present day landscape. In this sense, the past is reconstructed through a mosaic of modern character area boundaries. Each layer of landscape interpretation is established backwards through time with all associated description and historical sources attributed to these boundaries. In recognition of HLC’s retrogressive method, and inspired by the reverse chronology of DeSilvey’s (2012) anticipatory history, our analysis also works backwards from the present day. Figure 3 depicts the character types currently prevailing in Parkwood Springs, and in 1900, 1750 and 1400 respectively. Figure 4 explores ‘flux’: the extent to which each character area has changed.

Parkwood Springs Today. The Parkwood Springs area is predominantly characterised through HLC as an industrial space, although visually it is overwhelmingly ‘green’ in nature due to the natural succession and tree planting that has followed previous phases of landfill and extraction, and the presence of some remnant ancient woodland (Figure 3) that provides evidence of substantial time depth. A small light industrial complex is located along the River Don at the western edge of the site dating from the late 1920s/early 1930s, close to the

Figure 4. Landscape in flux – Historic Landscape Character plot of character areas exhibiting more than one change in broad character-type. (All HLC plots prepared by Stephen Dobson on the basis of the Sheffield HLC dataset (SYAS, undated)).

overgrown sites of the Old Park Silver Mill and Old Park Forge. This is surrounded by landfill, which incorporates pockets of woodland and unenclosed land. On all sides, Parkwood Springs is surrounded by the extensive urban fabric of Sheffield. Neighbouring residential areas include byelaw terraced housing and inter-war garden city suburbs. There is also a long stretch of industrial metal-trades along the river Don. The HLC broad character types outline a mixture of uses from multiple time-periods; however, the general character type of the whole zone is ‘industrial’ (SYAS). The generalised character type for this site is therefore greatly influenced by function rather than its visual appearance.

Parkwood Springs 1900. The 1900s time slice (Figure 3) identifies the fringe nature of Parkwood Springs at this time, as it occupies the space between Victorian urban Sheffield and the neighbouring countryside. Prior to the extractive industries that characterises the present day space, Parkwood Springs’s green centre is predominantly wooded. Some quarrying is visible at Standish Gardens, Shirecliffe, and clay pits/brick works are located in the south of the study area. Terraced housing is also evident in the south. Piecemeal enclosures are visible close to Shirecliffe Hall. The 1900 time-slice visually captures the study area in a predominantly agricultural/rural setting with many of the current land use divisions remaining legible from earlier enclosed land and woodland uses.

HLC, identifying a few distinct industrial character areas. Shirecliffe Hall is present in the 1750 time slice, but essentially the study area is characterised by woodland with piecemeal farming enclosures immediately surrounding the hall. Small hamlets are dispersed amongst a surrounding landscape of mainly surveyed Parliamentary enclosures with a few unenclosed commons. The ancient spring wood to the south west of the study area (next to a 17th-century farm complex) and landscape of enclosed farmland indicates the nature of the landscape character prior to the urban expansion visible from the 1900s.

Parkwood Springs 1400. The earliest time slice clearly shows that the study area is largely characterised by its use as a hunting park belonging to, and surrounding, the sub manor of Shirecliffe Hall. Other individual dispersed residential areas are present in the form of small farm complexes and settlements. Beyond the study boundary piecemeal enclosures and unenclosed commons form this predominantly agricultural landscape. Water power sites are established in the Don Valley at this time, reinforcing the ancient legacy of industrial activity, which characterises so much of the river’s course in this part of Sheffield. Ancient woodland follows the watercourse along with enclosed valley floor meadows.

A landscape in flux. The amount of change evident in this area is visually captured by the HLC phasing of four key time periods in Figure 3. However, as a means of summarising this level of flux Figure 4 highlights the areas that have seen more than one significant landscape change through time. Importantly, it is this plot that illustrates the fringe nature of Parkwood Springs, situated where the most changeable areas of the landscape in blue start to give way to the least changeable in white. This zone closely matches the urban/ rural divide upon which Parkwood Springs was a fringe site in 1900. Whilst much of the area defined as white in this plot is now residential, this is only a relatively recent phenomenon, since for many hundreds of years prior this had always been agricultural land. This position on the edge of flux may explain why, for the walking companion, Parkwood Springs ‘felt’ so much like an urban fringe.

Part 3 – Critical review of the narratives and their implications for the planning, design and management of Parkwood Springs as landscape heritage

The historical narrative is consistent with the deterministic narratives underpinning ‘authorized heritage discourse’, and with Ingold’s (2012) ‘materialising mode’. According to this some sites within Parkwood Springs could be seen as suitable for conservation or restoration as conventional heritage sites, for example the ruins of the Old Park Silver Mill on Club Mill Lane, or parts of Wardsend Cemetery. ‘Expert’ decisions would have to be taken about how to remove/manage the invading vegetation, which parts to preserve/restore, which period in history to foreground, and how visitors would interact with the site both in terms of physical access, and interpretation. The ‘materialising mode’ would preserve the material remains into the future, but remove them from the entropic processes that accompany the passage of time (DeSilvey, 2006; Woodward, 2001), cutting them adrift from their temporal context. For the ruins to be saved Didi-Huberman’s ‘physical sensation of time’ must be stripped away (1996: 58). The ‘materialising mode’ would make the ruins safer, and more physically accessible to a wider range of people, but some users would be displaced, and some of the sites’ existing qualities would be compromised, including their entropic decay with its tangle of nature and culture, their sense of mystery and incompleteness; as well as their potential for personal exploration, discovery and interpretation of meaning and identity: their ‘heuristic opening’ (Didi-Huberman, 1996: 54).

The personal account is a collection of impressions of Parkwood Springs that respond to the materiality of the site, but are at the same time informed by a cultural landscape that is both personal and idiosyncratic, social and shared. Although the account is a summary of a journey, which does have a kind of linear trajectory, the various localities are, in a sense, encountered randomly. It ranges over multiple temporalities, creating the possibility of what Garrett (2011) calls ‘pluritemporal encounters’, and multiple geographic scales: the Wild West frontier lands of 19th century America, the 20th century steel industry in Sheffield before the industrial collapse of the 1970s, a primeval landscape from geological time, a cemetery from the 1900s (each grave with its own story of time and place) and a vegetable patch with its implied promise for the future.

Compared with the historic narrative this account implies a completely different view of time in the landscape. Rather than being contained in the historical site multiple and shifting overlapping temporalities and geographies are ever present, crystallising momentarily through experience in a locality (Edensor, 2005; Massey, 1993, 2005), a process referred to by DeSilvey and Edensor (2013: 16) as ‘the contingent constitution of place’. In this way, we can conceive of chance interactions, unforeseen juxtapositions, multiple timeframes and remembering: encounters with Singer’s (2003) palimpsestic temporality and Hamilton’s kairotic time (2013).

protection, can potentially facilitate a much more active, embodied, way of connecting with the past. Edensor (2005: 850) refers to the ways in which the materials and forms of ruinous sites constrain the body to recreate habitual and familiar gestures as ‘possession’ or ‘embodied haunting’. As to whether we really experience ‘double exposure in that we walk in the past and the present simultaneously’ (Lo¨ fgren, 2002: 42), this inherent power of an object, or of a place, to induce a habitual, and possibly archetypal, physical and psychological response, has echoes in Didi-Huberman’s ‘physical sensation of time’ (1996: 58), and may also subsist in the wider landscape, for example in the act of walking along an ancient pathway, or up a steep hill. On the other hand, it may be that the temporal force of these landscape interactions derives from their power as dialectical images, whose revelatory impact connects us with the temporalities of personal and shared cultures and meanings.

Figure 5. Forest Garden at Parkwood Springs. (All photographs taken by Anna Jorgensen).

the product of the performance; a lived palimpsest of actions, the accumulation of which is the basis of tradition’.

In foregrounding the gestural mode in the planning, design and management of Parkwood Springs we would, in broad terms, look for ways of enabling current uses of the site to continue, and of creating the settings for new uses. These uses might range from the ephemeral, contingent and improvised to the more long-term, officially sanctioned and organized. It would be a case of providing a mix of indeterminate and programmed spaces, with a range of variants in between, and would involve making judgments about the level of intervention appropriate to each locality. Such judgements involve a delicate balance between laissez-faire and regulation, and, crucially, deciding which uses and users are acceptable within the reimagined landscape, and which need to be regulated out. Nevertheless, conceptualizing human activity and interaction with the landscape as culture, or as intangible heritage, does imply that the responsibility for re-imagining and continually ‘regenerating’ Parkwood Springs should be a shared one. As Smith (2006: 31) has pointed out: ‘The idea of a cultural landscape as heritage makes both conceptual and physical space for a wider range and layering of competing values than does the idea of ‘‘site’’’. The ‘gestural mode’ implies that users are not passive consumers but are fundamental to continually imagining and shaping the landscape.

in a ubiquitous landscape time (Turner, 2006). Thus in the plot from 1400 (Figure 3), as well as Sir John Mounteney’s deer park, we can see water power sites, ancient woodland, piecemeal enclosures and small farm complexes and settlements. This undermines the idea that each plot summarises an epoch characterised by a particular form of land use or land use change. The picture is a far more complex one of multiple forms of land use, at different scales, occurring simultaneously within different ‘trajectories of change’ (Turner, 2006: 395).

The spatially comprehensive nature of HLC analysis provides a valuable alternative to the boundedness of the historical site implicit in ‘authorized heritage discourse’ (Smith, 2006). Although character types are inevitably only a schematic interpretation of some aspects of landscape typology they help to suggest the existence of the complex temporal and spatial interrelationships inherent in landscape and place (DeSilvey and Edensor, 2013; Massey, 1993, 2005). Fairclough (2003) refers to HLC as ‘a framework for decision-making about change and management’ and Dobson and Selman (2012) claim that it can help overcome the binary between ‘conservation and change’ by seeing the whole landscape as a repository of time-depth, and by valorizing non-expert opinions as to the meaning and significance of this time depth.

However, whilst the Sheffield HLC is theoretically accessible to all via a public web site (SYAS, undated), information is difficult to access without prior knowledge and technical skill. Moreover, HLC has been critiqued on the grounds that the processes involved in creating the spatial datasets and their accompanying descriptions are reductive and flawed, and that it is suffused with a top-down ideology of landscape change to smooth the way for development (Williamson, 2007: 103): ‘It privileges top-down users and centralised authorities and it consequently disempowers communities and their connections to the landscape’. It has also been said that HLC replaces the chronological pseudo-objectivity of the historical narrative with a Cartesian one, privileging morphology over the fine grain of the landscape (Austin, 2007).

In this instance, the HLC helps to reveal the intangible quality of landscape heritage at Parkwood Springs, demonstrating that it does not reside purely in historical material remains or in small-scale spatial configurations of terrain and vegetation. At Parkwood Springs there is a quality that seems to permeate the entire landscape. Dobson and Selman (2012: 2) use the term ‘remanence’ to describe this, and assert that ‘By working with the remanence of broad temporal processes, rather than isolated ‘‘snapshots’’ of remnants in time and space, it is possible that a more comprehensive and inclusive location of the genius loci of a place can be promoted’. On the other hand, HLC may also help to draw attention to small-scale disregarded or undervalued ‘remnants’, and to emphasize linkages and networks rather than individual sites (Dobson, 2011; Dobson and Selman, 2012).

Thus, if we were to use the HLC in a quotidian mode of imagining the past at Parkwood Springs (Ingold, 2012), we might choose to work with some of the ‘broad temporal processes’ (Dobson and Selman, 2012) that it identifies. As we have seen Parkwood Springs has many histories including Deer Park, woodland, and site of power generation for Sheffield. These histories ‘anticipate’ a series of possible alternative or complementary futures for Parkwood Springs (e.g. venue for extreme sports, productive woodland; or water, wind or biomass power generation) (DeSilvey, 2012). We can therefore use the HLC to explore where time-depth in the wider landscape resides (as remnant, remanence or network) and how this might inform heritage practice.

Conclusion

landscape futures, and provide a greater range of possibilities in landscape and heritage planning, design and management. Whist the paper has focused on an urban waste site we believe the findings are relevant to landscape in general. Our paper also implies that further experimentation with storying landscape in landscape scholarship and research is needed. Our analysis reinforces the need for an awareness of the sheer diversity of narratives entangled in landscape and the many forms they can take. It highlights their underlying epistemologies and values, and their implications in terms of what the narratives valorize in the landscape. It points towards landscape and heritage strategies involving performativity and change, as opposed to static representations of the past. It suggests possibilities for the co-production of landscape by bodies and agencies that go far beyond ‘‘public consultation’’. Landscape is full of stories, and there are many different ways of telling them. This paper highlights the need for approaches to landscape and heritage that work with this complexity.

Notes

1. The preamble states: ‘landscape contributes to the formation of local cultures and...is a basic component of the European natural and cultural heritage, contributing to human well-being and consolidation of the

European identity’.

2. The Heritage Lottery Fund’s (2013) Landscape Conservation Action Plan (LCAP) Guidanceemphasizes the need to review existing Landscape Character Assessments and to prepare new ones if existing assessments need revision.

3. A comedy-drama film from 1997 directed by Peter Cattaneo, about unemployed steel workers fromSheffield in the 1970s who decide to form a male striptease act.

References

Armstrong H (2006) Time, dereliction and beauty: an argument for ‘landscapes of contempt’. In: International Federation of Landscape Architecture Conference papers 2006. Available at: www.

aila.org.au/lapapers/conferences/2006-01.htm (accessed 2 March 2012). Aldred O and Fairclough G (2003) Historic Landscape Characterisation Taking Stock of the Method.

The National HLC Review 2002. Bristol, UK: Somerset County Council, English Heritage.

Austin D (2007) Character or caricature. Landscapes 2: 92–105.

Bender B (ed.) (1993) Landscape: Politics and Perspectives. Oxford: Berg. Benjamin W (1999) The Arcades Project. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Berger A (2007) Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America. New York: Princeton Architectural

Brun M, Di Pietro F and Bonthoux S (in press) Residents’ perceptions and valuations of urban wastelands are influenced by vegetation structure. Urban Forestry & Urban Greening.

Cheng H (2012) The Landscape Character Turn: An Examination of Experience in the UK and Taiwan. PhD Thesis, Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Sheffield, UK.

Crouch D and Parker G (2003) Digging-up Utopia? Space, practice and land use heritage. Geoforum 34: 395–408.

Council of Europe (2000) European Landscape Convention. Available at: www.coe.int/t/dg4/ cultureheritage/heritage/landscape/ (accessed 1 November 2016).

Czarniawska B (2004) Narratives in Social Science Research. London: Sage. Department for Communities and Local Government (2012) National Planning

Policy Framework. London: Department for Communities and Local Government.

DeSilvey C (2006) Observed decay: Telling stories with mutable things. Journal of Material Culture 11(3): 318–338.

DeSilvey C (2012) Making sense of transience: An anticipatory history. Cultural Geographies 19: 31–54.

DeSilvey C and Edensor T (2013) Reckoning with ruins. Progress in Human Geography 37(4): 465–485.

Didi-Huberman G (1996) The Supposition of the aura: The now, the then, and modernity. In: Francis R (ed.) Negotiating Rapture the Power of Art to Transform Lives. Chicago: The Museum of Contemporary Art, pp. 48–63. Didi-Huberman G (2005) Confronting Images Questioning the Ends of a Certain

History of Art. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Dobson S (2011) Sustaining place through community walking initiatives. Journal of Cultural Heritage Management and Sustainable Development 1(2): 109–121. Dobson S (2012) Managing urban change: The culturally sustainable city – ‘A daunting task’. The Historic Environment: Policy and Practice 3(2): 179–184. Dobson S and Selman P (2012) Applying Historic Landscape Characterization in

spatial planning: From remnants to remanence. Planning Practice and Research 27(4): 459–474.

Edensor T (2005) The ghosts of industrial ruins: Ordering and disordering memory in excessive space. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23: 829– 849.

Fairclough G (2012) A prospect of time: Interactions between landscape architecture and archaeology. In: Bell S, Sarlov-Herlin I and Stiles R (eds) Exploring the Boundaries of Landscape Architecture. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 83–114.

Fairclough GJ (2003) ‘The long chain’: Archaeology, historical landscape characterization and time depth in the landscape. In: Palang H and Fry G (eds) Landscape Interfaces: Cultural Heritage in Changing Landscapes. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 295–317.

Farago C (2005) Response: Time out of joint. Art Bulletin 87(3): 424–429. Farley P and Symmons Roberts M (2011) Edgelands Journeys into England’s True

Wilderness. London: Jonathan Cape.

Friedlander E (2008) The Measure of the Contingent: Walter Benjamin’s Dialectical Image. Boundary 2 35: 3.

Frisby D (1986) Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer, and Benjamin. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Friends of Parkwood Springs (Undated) Available at: http://www.Parkwood Springs-springs.btck.co. uk (accessed 26 July 2013).

Gandy M (2013) Marginalia: Aesthetics, ecology, and urban wastelands. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 103(6): 1301–1316.

Garrett BL (2011) Assaying history: Creating temporal junctions through urban exploration. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29: 1048–1067. Grow Sheffield (2013) Join the Multi-faith forest garden at Parkwood Springs.

Available at: http:// growsheffield.com/join-the-multi-faith-forest-garden-at-Parkwood Springs-springs/ (accessed 29 July 2013).

Hamilton E (2013) Entrepreneurship across Generations. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

Harrison A (2006) National Land Use Database: Land Use and Land Cover Classification Version 4.4, (App. A). Norwich: Office of the Deputy Prime Minister.

Harrison R (2015) Beyond ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ heritage: Toward an ontological politics of heritage in the age of anthropocene. Heritage & Society 8(1): 24–42. Heritage Lottery Fund (2013) Landscape Conservation Action Plan (LCAP) guidance. Available at:

www.hlf.org.uk/landscape-conservation-action-plan (accessed 1 November 2016).

Hey D (2010) A History of Sheffield. Lancaster: Carnegie.

Hill L (2013) Archaeologies and geographies of the post-industrial past: Landscape, memory and the spectral. Cultural Geographies 20(3): 379–396. Ingold T (2012) Introduction. In: Janowski M and Ingold T (eds) Imagining

Landscapes: Past, Present and Future. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, pp. 1–18.

Jones M and Jones J (Undated) Parkwood Springs From Deer Park to Country Park? Available at: www.Parkwood Springs-springs.btck.co.uk/NewsInfo (accessed 29 July 2013).

Jorgensen A and Tylecote M (2007) Ambivalent landscapes – Wilderness in the urban interstices. Landscape Research 32(4): 443–462.

Lo¨ fgren O (2002) Landscapes of the mind. In: Landscape Architecture in Scandinavia: Projects from Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland. Topos, Munchen: Callwey Verlag, and Berlin:

Birkha¨ user.

Lyotard J (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Massey D (1993) Power-geometry and a progressive sense of place. In: Bird J, Putman BCT, Robertson G, et al. (eds) Mapping the Future: Local Cultures, Global Change. London: Routledge, pp. 60–70.

Massey D (2005) For Space. London: Sage Publications.

Orton J and Worpole K (2013) The New English Landscape. London: Field Station.

Potteiger M and Purinton J (1998) Landscape Narratives: Design Practice for Telling Stories. Hoboken: Wiley.

Rippon S (2004) Historic Landscape Analysis: Deciphering the Countryside. London: Council for British Archaeology.

Sheffield City Council (2009) Sheffield Local Plan. Available at:

https://www.sheffield.gov.uk/planningand-city-development/planning-documents/local-plan.html (accessed 26 July 2013).

Sheffield City Council (Undated a) City sites – Preferred options.

Sheffield City Council (Undated b) Population and health. Available at: https://www.sheffield.gov.uk/ your-city-council/sheffield-profile/population-and-health.html (accessed 29 July 2013).

Singer M (2003) ‘A slightly different sense of time’: Palimpsestic time in Invisible Man. Twentieth Century Literature 49(3): 388–419.

Smith L (2006) Uses of Heritage. London: Routledge.

South Yorkshire Archaeology Service (SYAS) (Undated) South Yorkshire

http://sytimescapes.org.uk/home#timeslice (accessed 29 July 2013). Tilley CY (1994) A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths, and Monuments. Oxford: Berg.

Turner S (2006) Historic Landscape Characterisation: A landscape archaeology for research, management and planning. Landscape Research 31(4): 385–398. Walton M (1943a) Shirecliffe Hall. Transactions of the Hunter Archaeological Society 15: 53–60.

Walton M (1943b) The Three Darnall Halls. Transactions of the Hunter Archaeological Society 15: 126–130.

Whitehand J (2010) Urban morphology and historic urban landscapes. In: van Oers R and Haraguchi S (eds) Managing Historic Cities UNESCO World Heritage Papers 27. Paris: UNESCO World Heritage Centre, pp. 35–43.

Whitehand JWR and Gu K (2010) Conserving urban landscape heritage: A geographical approach. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences 2(5): 6948– 6953.

Williamson T (2007) Historic Landscape Characterisation: Some queries. Landscapes 2: 64–71.

Winter T (2013) Clarifying the critical in critical heritage studies. International Journal of Heritage Studies 19(6): 532–545.

Woodward C (2001) In Ruins. London: Chatto & Windus.